Chemical or Organic? The Problem of Modern Agriculture

I’m just an amateur gardener; I’m not even a real gardener, truth be told. I’ve got two short rows of corn, which I’ve never grown before this year, enough beans to fill my pantry for a while, and tomatoes to keep us happy. I’m also experimenting with cucumbers and a couple of apple trees, carefully pruned to keep them compatible with my small-city urban lot. But John Médaille’s recent note on the current woes of chemical farmers seems to call for further comment.

As an amateur gardener, I latched onto the organic bandwagon pretty quickly. It’s much cheaper, for one thing; I’ve got the garbage that I need for composting anyway, and I need little else in the way of fertilizer. I buy open-pollinated crops (Redwood City Seed Company has some interesting breeds, but they’re everywhere these days if you keep your eyes out) so that I can save the seeds, so once I’ve bought a packet I’ve got seed forever, barring some catastrophic crop failure. More importantly, though, it allows me to pursue (very) small-scale agriculture without complete dependence upon fertilizer producers and Monsanto; they won’t let you save their seeds.

Geoff Hamilton’s Organic Gardening was such a wealth of information to me that I can’t begin to praise it enough. Eminently practical, Hamilton acknowledges the huge advances made in agricultural science in the past century; he then proceeds to harness those advances for organic production. He explains, “[t]he purely chemical gardener uses his soil simply as a means of anchoring plant roots and of holding artificial fertilizers to provide plant nutrients,” noting that “[t]his approach does have excellent results, in the short term.” On the other hand,

[i]n the long term … it has two disastrous consequences. Because organic matter is not replaced, the soil organisms die out; without them the soil structure breaks down and the soil becomes hard, airless and unproductive. Attempts at “force-feeding” the plants result in soft, sappy growth, which is prone to attack by all manner of pests and diseases. In order to control them, chemical pesticides are used, often with short-term success. But, in killing the pest, they also kill its natural predators so, eventually, the problem gets worse. Stronger and more poisonous pesticides have to be resorted to, and so it goes on. It is a vicious circle that, once started, is difficult to break.

The organic gardener, on the other hand, is really cultivating soil rather than merely plants; he’s ensuring that the earth is healthy, so that the fruit of the earth will also be healthy. Hamilton illustrates these principles throughout the book, and he does so in such an erudite and convincing way, based on his own decades of experience as both a chemical and organic gardener, that it convinced a puny little upstart like me most thoroughly.

Nor is Hamilton the only one singing the praises of organic crop raising. For example, Gene Logsdon, in his own words a “contrary farmer,” has published a new edition of Small-Scale Grain Raising, a fantastic explanation of organic grain raising on a reasonable scale. (This, incidentally, is what convinced me that growing corn on my little bit of land wasn’t an idiotic idea; next year, if I can get a decent crop this year, I’ll grow a lot more, Deo volente.) Logsdon has written extensively, and an abnormal amount of very interesting work can be found for free at his blog. He’s been farming since horses were the up-to-the-minute tools, and he continues to farm even in his old age. And he’s got some very interesting things to say about chemical and organic farming.

What sparked this article was a note that weeds, especially pigweed (a useful plant in itself, but not compared to the crops it’s supplanting), are becoming resistant to Monsanto’s famous wide-ranging poison, Roundup. But in Small-Scale Grain Raising, Logsdon notes that there is one weed control mechanism that pests will never become resistant to: the hoe. And on his blog he has a paean to hoemanship that nearly brings tears to the eyes of a romantic wannabe agriculturalist like me. This is just one of Logsdon’s examples of where our modern farming methods are going wrong, and really a pretty superficial one at that. But Logsdon has written countless works illustrating the problem with modern farming methods; all are worth some perusing.

Hamilton and Logsdon are just two examples of the great organic revolution that seems, slowly but surely, to be gaining ground. It’s gaining ground because there’s a fundamental problem with the way we currently do our agriculture. That fundamental problem is this: we’re extracting the nutrients out of our soil without replacing them, in the same way that we’re pulling oil out of the ground without replacing it. Because we’re not cultivating healthy soil, we’re forced to rely on chemical fertilizers, which are expensive and make the farmer dependent upon fertilizer producers for his livelihood. Furthermore, this chemical farming encourages enormous plots, making traditional weed-control methods impractical. These large plots also tend to be monocultural, allowing pests that feed on those crops to reproduce much more quickly than they otherwise could. As a result, farmers are forced to use chemical poisons like Roundup, which leads to the development of Roundup-resistant weeds, which leads to the application of still more Roundup mixed with still more chemical poisons.

The sad thing is that weeds can be controlled without this expensive dependence on Monsanto, with the plow and the hoe. The sad thing is that soil nutrients can be replaced, and even sustained indefinitely, without this expensive dependence on chemical fertilizers and their producers, with manure and green manure crops. Logsdon shows this through the example of his own farm, and can cite many other examples and techniques by which this is done. Some studies have even shown organic farming to produce as good or better yields than chemical farming, and that organic farming has some other significant advantages, as well.

Organic methods are more sustainable, at least tolerably efficient, and most significantly less poisonous than chemical methods of agriculture. So why can’t they be more widely adopted?

The answer is that these methods can’t be used on our modern enormous monocultural fields run by huge and distant businesses. Such businesses have a vested interest in the highest possible yields per acre and the purchase of chemical fertilizers and weedkillers; they have no interest in preserving the long-term stability of the soil (they can just keep dumping chemicals on it, after all) or in the massive pollution of the countryside, an externality that has little to no effect on their bottom line. Society needs smaller farms run by independent farmers, farms small enough that these traditional, and invincible, methods of soil cultivation and weed control, coupled with new scientific discoveries and practices, are both practical preferable. In other words, we need distributism applied to agriculture.

But wouldn’t this drive the price of food up? Isn’t that why organic food is more expensive than “regular” food? Yes, it would. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

The fact is that food is expensive. It’s the most important thing that a society produces, without which society can produce nothing else, and it takes time, work, and resources to do so. That all adds up to cost. But what the above paragraph is concerned about isn’t cost considered simply; rather, it’s cost in the grocery store. If Americans can’t get their beef for three dollars a pound, why, there’d be a riot!

But the cost in the grocery store is only a tiny part of the whole picture. The real costs of food production aren’t remotely all reflected in the price we pay for it at Food Lion. Time Magazine not long ago ran a piece well titled Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food which explains some of these extra costs nicely. Take, for example, chemical fertilizers. These are not natural chemicals, and the natural world does not react well to them. Millions of tons of the stuff is poured onto crops within the Mississippi basin; this fertilizer washes out of the soil and into the Gulf of Mexico, where it produces a huge region with little oxygen and therefore few fish. Nor is this, by far, the only “dead zone” in the oceans. And that’s just one effect of the fertilizer bombardment, leaving out the problems of the pesticides.

These costs are there, an integral part of modern industrial food production (which we still euphemistically call farming). But they’re not passed on to consumers; they’re shoved onto society at large. In other words, these costs are externalized. So we feel like we’re getting cheap food when we buy a pound of apples for a dollar at the grocery store; but we’re not. We’re getting food that doesn’t cost much money; it’s still extremely expensive, more expensive than we can really afford. It costs us a dollar a pound; but it also costs us our topsoil, our fisheries, the health of our rivers, and the health of ourselves. Rationally, we ought to pay the farmer a bit more money than sacrifice everything else.

So not only do small farmers need distributism in agriculture; the world needs it, as well. We’re not only wiping out our small farmers with our current methods, we’re also wiping out our soil and the rest of our natural world. Catholic social teaching provides us the solution to this societal problem. We need to apply it to agriculture, the fundamental industry of all human civilization.

Praise be to Christ the King!

More State Capitalist Duplicity

So how are those bailouts going?

Swimmingly, we’re told. Indeed, Ed Whitacre, CEO of what is still euphemistically called the private corporation of General Motors, has been bragging about GM’s many accomplishments this past year or two. He notes that many people didn’t want to give “GM a second chance,” which seems an odd way of referring to bulldozing boatloads of public funds into a corporation dedicated to private profit. But Mr. Whitacre proceeds further, justifying this public largess by arguing that GM has paid back its full loan, with interest, five years early. (This bold claim occurs at 0:15.) Mr. Whitacre then states, “But there is still more to do.”

He’s absolutely right, of course. Not about the paying the government loan back; that’s a deliberate deception, though the shenanigans GM played with public dollars do make it fall short (just short) of a bald-faced lie. He’s right about there being still more to do. Specifically, paying back most of the fifty billion dollars poured into GM’s trough in 2008. Not to mention, of course, the more than eight billion dollars generously donated by the Canadian government.

GM, see, received nearly fifty billion dollars ($49.5 billion, more precisely) from the American government in 2008. Of that, precisely $6.7 billion was an actual loan, which required paying back with interest. (7%, which is apparently an extremely generous, to GM, interest rate given the enormous risk of investing in GM at the time.) The rest was a purchase of stock, stock which was worth practically nothing at the time; in other words, the rest was a gift. GM has paid back the $6.7 billion loan; the rest of the $49.5 billion remains in its coffers, still a gift from the public to the already rich.

That alone makes Mr. Whitacre’s claim a bit deceptive; he makes it sound as though the taxpayer’s been made whole, which he clearly hasn’t. But it gets even better. GM didn’t pay this $6.7 billion dollars back from its own earnings; indeed, GM hasn’t posted a profit since 2004, even with all the bailout money we’ve given it. No, GM paid back its government loan with—wait for it—its government gift!

Let me explain. $13.4 billion of the bailout money was put into an escrow account for GM. GM paid back the loan from this money. In other words, GM paid the public back part of its bailout by using another part of its bailout. Brilliant; only twenty-first century capitalism could possibly analyze this and call it a free and fair loan repayment.

But, just when we all thought it couldn’t, it gets even better. GM has recently applied for another government loan, this time from the Department of Energy. This loan will have only a 5% interest rate, much lower than that of the TARP loan. So GM paid back the government with government funds in order to get more government money at a lower interest rate. Score: GM 50 billion, public -50 billion. Not counting, of course, the new loan from the Department of Energy.

The whole sordid scheme is well-known and well-demonstrated, despite the media’s persistent parroting of Mr. Whitacre’s line.

So what can a distributist draw from this comedy of errors? Quite simply, we can note that this proves us right.

Belloc noted nearly a century ago in The Servile State that capitalism inevitably either devolves into socialism or collapses under its own weight. It took longer than he expected, but we’re on the cusp of one or the other right now. When productive property is concentrated entirely or almost entirely in the hands of the few, and the many are simply laborers on that productive property (in other words, a proletariat, whether white- or blue-collar), those owners of productive property become extremely powerful. They become so powerful, in fact, that the government comes to serve them, rather than the public. That’s exactly what happened with our bailout, and what happens daily with our regulations and even our culture. The extent of this ownership of our government by wealthy, private interests has been more extensively explored elsewhere, and in the end it’s undeniable. How long until, as John Médaille facetiously but possibly presciently quipped, “politician[s] [are] required to begin and end each speech with the statement ‘This message brought to you by …’ and list the names of his three top contributors?”

The capitalists, those few owners of productive property, own our society, and they will not give that up just because one of their own was caught in a clear deception on national television. Indeed, that deception is still being aired on the networks on a nightly basis, despite its being thoroughly and publicly revealed as such. No, they will continue as they are, secure in their knowledge of their ownership of America.

So insurance companies will rejoice in legislation that requires everyone to buy their plans while offering no real competition to them. Goldman Sachs will support Wall Street reform, because they know that in the end it will only benefit them. Goldman Sachs is the government; so are the insurance companies. The government is bought and paid for; we live in a plutocracy.

As distributists, we cannot let this continue unabated; we must oppose it from start to finish. But let’s not just continue to address the symptoms; we must address the disease. The disease is the concentration of productive property in the hands of the few, while the many are consigned to remain proletarians; that is, the disease is capitalism itself. Only when property is so widely distributed that society as a whole takes on the character of owners rather than of nonowning workers will the plutocracy end.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Down with the Plutocracy!

It’s ever-increasingly clear that the Republicans and the Democrats are really just two opposing factions within a single plutocratic party. Their official platforms vary considerably, of course, and their favorite dead horses to beat are different dead horses. But in the long run, they both hold the same basic principles.

Both parties hold that American spending on the military is appropriate, and attempts to cut that spending in any significant degree are met with extreme opposition.

Both parties agree that unqualified support for the Israeli state is a vital part of American foreign policy.

Both parties agree that the “Global War on Terror” is an essential piece of American foreign policy, and that the American military should not be withdrawn from either of our current wars or from any significant number of our countless foreign bases.

Both parties agree that the president, without a declaration of war from Congress, is free to send the American military on adventures that he sees fit, and that defunding such adventures when, very belatedly, they meet with one or the other faction’s disapproval is not an appropriate remedy.

Both parties support the decriminalization of sodomy and other perversions.

Both parties believe that abortion should not be criminalized. I’m aware that this assertion is controversial, but look at the facts. Look at the major candidates presented by the Republican party, for example, in the last presidential election: John McCain; Mitt Romney; Rudy Giuliani. Look at the ostracism that was displayed for the pro-life candidates, who despite temporary success made no headway: Mike Huckabee; Ron Paul. Is there any meaningful difference in the opinions of these major candidates from those of the opposing faction? Yes, Sarah Palin is pro-life (though ludicrously bizarre in many of her other views), but that doesn’t count, because as Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first vice president, John Nance Garner, correctly observed, the vice-presidency is “not worth a warm bucket of piss.” A lower half of a ticket thrown as a sop to pro-life constituencies does not a significant difference make.

Most significantly, both parties depend upon large quantities of money to gain and maintain office, and both derive the vast bulk of that money from the same corporate sponsors.

It’s the last bit that I’m concerned with. Plutocracy is rule by the wealthy; it is often used interchangeably with plutarchy, a combination of plutocracy and oligarchy, which is the rule of the few. What we have in America today is not a democracy; it is not a republic, though it has some of the remnants of the old Republic; it’s a plutarchy. But for convenience’s sake, and also because “plutocrat” sounds better than “plutarch,” I’ll be referring to it as a plutocracy.

As the aforelinked Wikipedia article correctly notes,

In a plutocracy, the degree of economic inequality is high while the level of social mobility is low. This can apply to a multitude of government systems, as the key elements of plutocracy transcend and often occur concurrently with the features of those systems.

That fits modern American society exactly. The degree of economic inequality in America is high. It’s middling-high according to the commonly used metric, the Gini coefficient (though even then it’s higher than Canada and Europe, particularly Scandinavia, as well as India and Indonesia, and it’s in the same category as such political and economic utopias as China and Malaysia), but to illustrate the enormous factual inequality only a few numbers will suffice.

The average CEO in America in 2007 made 364 times the salary of the average worker, and the average hedge fund manager makes 16,000 times that average worker’s salary. This is truly enormous, even compared to the recent past; only twenty years ago, the average CEO made only 71 times that of the average worker. This indicates that the income gap has been expanding extremely rapidly; and that is, in fact, the case.

Some very disturbing numbers from the University of California at Santa Cruz indicate an alarmingly widening wealth gap in America. From 1983 until 2007, the total net worth of the bottom 80% of the population went from 18.7% of the nation’s wealth to 15%; in the same period, the total net worth of the top 20%, minus the top 1%, went from 47.5% to 50.5%. The astute reader will notice that that’s an increase of only 3% to balance a decrease of 3.7%; that’s because a full 0.7% of that increase accrued only to the top 1% of the population. And this over less than a quarter century.

The bottom line is that the top 1% of the population controls a full 34.7% of the wealth in this country, and the top 20% controls a full 85.1% of that wealth, leaving only 14.9% of the wealth for 80% of the population. That’s less than one sixth of the wealth being owned by a full four-fifths of our population. Surely this is an enormous inequality of wealth by any reckoning.

The other characteristic of plutocracy is low social mobility. Arguably, we don’t have that in America. Anybody can become fantastically rich without starting that way, the tale goes, and that’s at least facially true. There are no institutional barriers to the child of a homeless migrant laborer becoming president of the United States, or CEO of the country’s largest corporation. We don’t have a caste system, in other words, in which citizens are formally prohibited from being mobile outside of their particular classes. However, the story really isn’t that simple.

The absence of formal, institutions prohibitions on social mobility does not make a society highly mobile; it merely indicates the absence of one means of preventing that social mobility. There are others, of course, some of which are mostly invisible. Tom Hertz of American University has published a lengthy report detailing the state of social mobility in America, and his results may be surprising to those wedded to the standard story we’ve heard so long that in America, all you need to succeed is hard work. You need, as it turns out, a bit more than that.

• Low-income children have only a 1% chance of becoming one of the wealthiest 5% of society.
• Middle-class children (by which I mean here “children born in the middle quintile of parental family income”) have only 1.8% chance of becoming one of the wealthiest 5% of society.
• “By international standards, the United States has an unusually low level of intergenerational mobility: our parents’ income is highly predictive of our incomes as adults. Intergenerational mobility in the United States is lower than in France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway and Denmark. Among high-income countries for which comparable estimates are available, only the United Kingdom had a lower rate of mobility than the United States.”
• The middle classes are less secure in their income, and getting less secure in it over time, as opposed to the upper classes, who are more secure in their incomes, and are getting more secure in it over time.

In other words, the United States is not particularly socially mobile, at least not as much as we think we are.

Is high social mobility even a good thing? Arguably not; however, its presence in a society in conjunction with a high inequality of wealth is a strong indicator that we’re living in a plutocracy.

So we live in a plutocracy; what does this mean? It means that the people who make the decisions are, to an overwhelming extent, the people who have money. Lots of money. We can see clear evidence of this in the sorts of laws that they end of passing. The financial bailouts are the most obvious example; twenty-three trillion dollars to ensure that the wealthy bankers and speculators are kept safe, because they’re “too big to fail,” a cost which must be born by the public even while their own private interests get the benefit. If there were any doubt that the bailouts were largely motivated by the private interests of the plutocrats, all such doubt should be gone by now.

These, of course, are merely legislators; what about the so-called regulators, who hold much of the real power in the nation? The situation there is, if possible, even more dire. The regulators of our industries are literally in the pockets of those industries, a phenomenon that is well-known in political circles and called “industry capture.” Of course, despite it being well-known nothing is ever done about it because the situation is extremely helpful to the plutocracy. Two great examples will suffice to demonstrate this condition of our regulators, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of the Treasury.

The Department of Agriculture is put in place to regulate, as the name implies, agriculture throughout our nation. As such, it’s supposed to regulate all of agriculture, from the largest of factory farms to the smallest family one. However, family farms have only a little money, while factory farms have a lot of it, and as such the Department of Agriculture ends up regulating family farms right out of business and factory farms into ever-increasing piles of new wealth.

Monsanto, a ridiculously huge agribusiness corporation, is a producer of many farming chemicals, most particularly the fantastically deadly herbicide Round-Up, along with seeds which are genetically engineered to be resistant to Round-Up, which it calls “Round-Up Ready” seeds. Of course, it alone can sell Round-Up Ready seeds, because it has a patent on them. It is illegal, therefore, for a farmer to save Round-Up Ready seeds from his own plants. This is a fairly standard market capture technique here, very similar to that practiced by Microsoft in the computer field, and as such isn’t particularly surprising, nor even particularly plutocratic. But things get even better from here.

Monsanto has totally dominated the Department of Agriculture, to such an extent that one reviewer has noted that “Monsanto employees and government regulatory agencies employees are the same people. Examples of this sort of thing abound. It doesn’t help, of course, that Monsanto spent nearly nine million dollars lobbying in 2008 alone, or that another Monsanto alumnus was appointed to the FDA in 2009. And yet, when the Department of Agriculture, the FDA, and similar farming-related agencies constantly propose and support laws that will make small farming more difficult or impossible, no one in authority ever asks any questions. Because these, remember, are their fellow plutocrats.

The situation is much the same with the Federal Reserve, as well as the Department of the Treasury and similar federal agencies. Goldman Sachs is the name of the game here. Henry Paulson, George Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury, was a Goldman Sachs CEO; Timothy Geithner, our current secretary, is a Goldman Sachs alum prior to serving the Federal Reserve in New York. These officials literally speak out of both sides of their mouth, saying that they want to reduce lobbyist influence while appointing lobbyists—Goldman lobbyists, of course—to their staffs. Neel Kashkari, in charge of overseeing TARP distributions, was moved to that position by Goldman Sachs alumnus Hank Paulson from—guess where?—Goldman Sachs. Joshua Bolton, John Corzine, Stephen Friedman—the list goes on and on and on. And SEC chief operating officer? Meet Adam Storch, Goldman Sachs alumnus, hired at the ripe old age of 29. Yet these are the same men who are supposed to regulate the industry that formed them.

So vote, we are told; if you don’t like the situation, throw the bums out! Vote for somebody new! The only response to this can be, for whom else shall we vote? We’re presented in nearly every election with someone from one or the other faction of the same plutocratic party. We can throw one bum out, but only by throwing another bum back in. How else can we explain the fact that Congress consistently gets less than 50% approval ratings while maintaining a higher than 85% reelection rate?

The situation is so blatantly plutocratic that the plutocrats are starting to be very open about it. Citigroup, a large investment firm which only continues to exist thanks to the plutocracy (bailouts), is the best example. Utilizing the neologism “plutonomy,” Citigroup praises the situation of “income and wealth inequality,” praising the fact that “[t]he rich are in great shape, financially.” They further note that those great religious causes of the plutocracy, globalization and the constant advance of technology, “contribute to the plutonomy,” and do so “at the expense of labor.” In other words, they benefit the rich and harm the poor. All of this, according to Citigroup, an unquestioned and honored member of the plutocracy, is a good thing.

Welcome to the plutocracy, ladies and gentlemen. You’ve been here for a while already.

So what can we, as distributists, do about this situation? The sad answer is that we can do very little, in the short run. The very nature of the plutocracy is that it’s tight-knit, hard to break into; unless you’re very rich, or at least can become very rich, you’re just not in it, which means that you’re more or less excluded from the echelons of power. But that doesn’t mean that we can do nothing.

The most important thing to do is take control of our own lives. We are men, not automatons, nor slaves of the machine on which the plutocrats are still, even now, just putting the finishing touches. Most of us may have the knowledge of infants, but we still have the souls of men. Let’s exercise them, train them, and make ourselves what we ought to be: free citizens. A society made up of free citizens itself cannot help but become free itself.

Becoming a free citizen involves some of the same things we’ve been hearing about since our teachers forced us to memorize the Bill of Rights in elementary school. (I know they don’t do that anymore; but they ought to.) We must speak our minds; speak out against the plutocracy, against capitalism, against greed, and in favor of free government, distributism, and moderation. Refuse to be a part of the plutocratic machine. Refuse to confine ourselves to the rival factions; vote for the candidate whose policies are best, not whose are least worst. It may even be feasible to seek political office ourselves, particularly on the local level.

But it also involves things that we didn’t have to memorize in elementary school. Distributism is about freedom, of course, but it’s about economic freedom in particular. There are many things we can do to fight the plutocracy that capitalism has wrought, and that fight can itself further the distributist cause. They are legion, and each distributist will undoubtedly be able to come up with many of his own. A few that immediately present themselves are as follows:

• Begin to produce. Don’t rely on the machine to produce everything for you. Even if you don’t have a lick of soil to your name, grow something in pots. Keep small livestock, like rabbits or chickens. If you are fortunate enough to have any land, no matter how little, you can grow more than you think. Study the matter. Hamilton’s Organic Gardening is the stuff of legend. Most of Logsdon’s works are also excellent, particularly Small-Scale Grain Raising, either the first or second editions; it’s persuaded me quite thoroughly that grains, particularly corn, are feasible even for a small gardener on an urban lot. Storey’s many guides, like the Guide to Raising Rabbits or Guide to Raising Chickens will probably be all the small producer needs to know. And “grazing” or foraging is available to anyone, opening up a world of food products for which we need not depend on the vagaries of an industrial and plutocratic capitalism. Few more distributist tasks can be imagined.
• Walk somewhere. Really, put the keys of the car away and just walk somewhere. We should consider locating ourselves close enough to our places of work to walk there. We must not fall into the modern trap of considering anything longer than a hundred yards too far, either; I might be a young man, but I’ve got a bad knee on one leg and a bad ankle on the other, yet I manage to walk two miles to work nearly every day (I do carpool home pretty frequently), a walk of only about half an hour. If such relocation is not possible, let us walk to the store; walk to church; or just walk for walking’s sake. See people and say hello. Look into shop windows on a main street somewhere. Walk down the street and hear the tweeting of the birds, the barking of the dogs, the cries of the children at their play. Feel the weather. The universe is not seventy-two degrees at all times, and neither should our skin be. Accustom ourselves to the real, physical world. Distributism, despite protestations from capitalists to the contrary, is fundamentally about the real; let us remember what the real is by being part of it again.
• Buy. No, that’s not a typo, but it’s not consumerism, either. Buy selectively. We should refuse to be engulfed in the “save a buck at all costs” mentality that our plutocratic society tries to thrust on us. Try to pay attention to slave-made goods, and avoid them whenever possible. Try to buy local in preference to remote. And support those businesses which respect distributist principles while declining to support those which don’t.
• Relate. Above all, don’t just buy local, be local. Relate to the people around us. Get involved in our local parishes, perhaps trying to spread distributist principles and practices through them. Get to know our neighbors; think how many of us probably can’t even name our neighbors? Next time we have a barbecue, invite a few of them over. Let’s talk to them when we see them outside; share our produce with them; listen to them tell us about their children, their hedges, the annoying person who lives on the other side of their house. These are the people we live with; it’s only decent to get to know them.

The plutocracy hates all of these things, because none of them are profitable for it. Seeking money and power before all else, these practices deprive them of both. These are the actions of a free people taking charge of their own destinies and their own communities. These are really the only ways we can effectively fight the plutocracy. Let’s embrace them, and fight to our last breath.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Our Disastrous Debt Economy

I’m pretty old-fashioned economically, really. I put a relatively new name on my economic opinions (I call them “distributism,” a term derived from “distributive justice” and only in existence for less than a hundred years), but it’s really a set of pretty conservative principles, some of which even Republicans and libertarians will agree with. A few of my fundamental principles:

• An economy, like all parts of society, exists to help its members proceed away from vice and toward virtue. The provision of sufficient quantities of material goods, however it may be done, is a necessary part of this.
• Because economics deals with the distribution of material goods in a society, distributive justice is its fundamental principle. This distinguishes it from, say, criminal law, in which retributive justice is the fundamental principle.
• The bedrock of any economy is production of useful goods for human consumption. We cannot consume what has not first been made. Putting consumption before production is putting the cart before the horse.
• At least considered in the abstract, local is better than remote. The perfection of a society comes in part from possessing the greatest possible degree of self-sufficiency. Thus, encouraging reliance on remote, or even foreign, sources of goods when such goods can be produced locally is a Bad Idea.
• Debt is a burden on an economy; too much debt will cripple or kill it. My grandmother once told me, “If you can’t afford it until tomorrow, wait until tomorrow to buy it.” But she is a child of a different age, with saner principles in her mind.

That last is my topic today. We’re awash in debt. The primary issue most businesses have had during our current “economic crisis” is the inability to acquire more debt quickly enough. Our federal government, even, is in the hole nearly twelve trillion dollars, and that crushing debt is increasing at a record pace while our government lives out to its fullest Dick Cheney’s idiotic principle that “deficits don’t matter“.

The average American’s credit card debt is $8,329. That’s just credit card debt alone; that doesn’t include pesky little things like mortgages, car payments, student loans, hospital bills, and the million other things that people need to take out credit for. Indeed, in 2007 14.7 percent of U.S. families had debt exceeding 40 percent of their income. And then they still had to pay their mortgages, pediatricians, and so on.

Can anyone seriously look at this situation and claim it represents a healthy government and a healthy economy? At first, of course, it seems great; that’s why the Fed “stimulates” the economy by lowering interest rates to encourage people to borrow more. People are flush with cash with which they buy lots of stuff that they otherwise couldn’t afford; this makes car dealers and television salesmen very, very happy, which makes stocks go up, which means people borrow even more because they feel that things are only getting better, and so on. But this is a very limited boost to the economy.

Because, of course, it can only last so long. Eventually, the people lending this money out do actually want it back. With interest. And people begin struggling to make their payments. Many of them default; many of those who do not are forced to forego many purchases which they would otherwise make in order to pay off those bills. Businesses which might have hired one more person with real money, rather than three with debt, have to fire their three debt employees and hire nobody instead while they pay it back. It’s clearly a loss from the individual perspective; but for a while, the economy manages to cancel out those negatives and continue apace, building itself on ever-increasing piles of debt.

Too bad it’s bad debt. Eventually, those individual financial disasters begin to accumulate. They start as a trickle, increase into a flow, and finally crest as a tidal wave. And here we are, at the beginning of the tidal wave, right now, while our years and years of living beyond our means by borrowing for things that we couldn’t afford finally, at long last, catch up to us.

Who’s responsible for this situation? Facially, of course, it’s citizens and businesses who engaged in very risky credit behavior. Namely, it’s almost everybody in the country. But most of these people were relying on advice and on policies from higher up, coming from everywhere from the banks to the Fed itself. I myself, when buying my house, had to deal with constant encouragement from mortgage lenders to spend more than I had, despite my repeated insistence, and provision of a specific maximum figure, that I would spend only this much and no more. Those with less control or knowledge over their financial situation are surely much more likely to succumb.

The banks are really responsible, taking their cue from the Federal Reserve, who encouraged their reckless lending behavior with obscenely low interest rates. (Rates which remain obscenely low even as we speak.) And so, naturally, the banks ended up holding the biggest and heaviest bag when the debt hit the fan. But the banks also had the most money, even if it was funny money. They asked their friends at the Fed and the Treasury to help. And those friends moved heaven and earth to ensure that these banks would never, under any circumstances, face the consequences of their own actions, even as the poor in this great country literally lose house and home for following the advice that the Fed and these banks gave them.

So the banks are the truest of capitalists. Profit is privatized, as they made billions of dollars thanks to the government’s easy-lending policies. But costs are publicized, as the taxpayers of this generation and of countless generations to come pay the price when those policies finally run up against the inevitable wall. This is wrongdoing in the extreme. We have become a country run not by the people, nor even by a despot. We are an oligarchy, in which our very richest get whatever they want, taking the profits of the public largesse while forcing the hoi polloi to stomach the losses.

MSNBC, of all places, put up an interesting monologue which prompted me to return to this topic:

What is said in this video is true. The “Troubled Asset Relief Program,” which sprayed seven hundred billion dollars in free money all over the big banks like a fire hose, is just a drop in the bucket. TARP, combined with other federal programs bailing out the already rich and powerful, comes to 23.7 trillion dollars. This figure comes from our government itself, surely not given to inflating its estimates of its own reckless expenditures.[1] For comparison, the combined GDP of the entire world is only about sixty trillion dollars.

I mentioned earlier my grandmother’s statement, which I’ll go ahead and call Nana’s Principle: if you can’t afford it until tomorrow, don’t buy it until tomorrow. Reactionary advice, indeed. This seemed perfectly natural common sense to her generation; bred in the roaring twenties, matured in the Depression, steeled in the furnace of the Second World War. She and my grandfather, a combat veteran of that war and a sometime coal-miner, were much alike in that way; they grew up growing their own potatoes and shooting a lot of their own meat, and even in their adulthoods didn’t buy what they couldn’t afford. My own mother spent her infancy sleeping in an opened dresser drawer because they couldn’t afford a cradle.

It appears, though, that the apparatus of our government, much of which is only a decade or so younger than that heroic woman from whom I’m honored to be descended, appears incapable of digesting even in its maturity the lessons that she understood by the time she was ten years old. Nana’s Principle, so simple as to seem obvious, is completely beyond it. Its dependency on rich and powerful interests is so pervasive and so complete that it simply cannot contemplate not giving those interests everything they desire, up to and including indebting their country in the amount of over a third of the global gross domestic product to make sure that those interests remain ever rich and ever powerful, and leaving the poor, the workers, and the middle class to foot the enormous bill, in this generation and in the generations hereafter.

As I mentioned earlier, my economic opinions are pretty old-fashioned, though they go by a fancy name. That name is derived from an ancient concept, one hallowed in the annals of philosophy and politics for thousands of years: distributive justice, the giving to each what is his due. That is what distributism is, at its core: the implementation of distributive justice within an economic system. But this bailout system is the exact opposite of distributive justice. It gives profit to recklessness and costs to frugality; it gives benefit to fiscal incompetence, and even to fiscal malice, while thrusting its costs onto the complicit but largely innocent, and certainly less responsible, public. It’s an injustice, pure and simple, a violation of the principles which should guide all economic activity.

We must all pray that our nation recovers from and remedies this idiocy soon.

Praise be to Christ the King!

1. July 2009 Quarterly Report to Congress 137-38 appears to be its first acknowledgment in governmental literature. It appeared in some subsequent quarterly reports, as well; in the January 2010 report, however, it and the entire section it represented appears to be completely missing, without any explanation for the omission that I have uncovered.

A Cooperative Business Model

My, my. It has been a long time since I’ve posted, hasn’t it? Well, here’s one for you: cooperative business models.

Business in the West has traditionally been seen to be competitive. And it is, of course, to a certain degree. That’s even healthy, of course—to a certain degree. As Pope Pius XI taught us, competition “within certain limits [is] just and productive of good results” (Quadragesimo Anno, p. 44), and no distributist would say that all competition has to be done away with. However, Pius XI also taught us that competition “cannot be the ruling principle of the economic world” (id.), and it’s here that distributists generally part ways with their capitalist confreres on this issue.

How, after all, is innovation and development supposed to occur without competition, the capitalists ask? Without the incentive to beat out their competitors, why would anyone devote money, time, and expertise to solving problems? And if people aren’t devoting these thing to solving problems, how can we expect any industry to advance? Do you want us all plowing with wooden shares on inadequately rotated crops again?

To which the distributists can cite any number of examples, many of which have been cited to directly on this site. One that’s often neglected, however, is one that’s at the forefront of one of the most innovative and quickly-changing industries in the world, computers and the software that runs them. So for purposes of this brief article, I will respond to this capitalist argument with one simple word: Linux.

GNU/Linux, actually. It’s by now a well-known phenomenon that has been enormously successful in the computing world, effectively competing with the likes of Sun Microsystems (once an industry powerhouse with its SPARC servers and Solaris operating system; now much reduced, being purchased by database company Oracle), Microsoft, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard. A clone of Unix, versions of which were sold competitively by IBM, HP, AT&T, Sun, and other companies, GNU/Linux has overtaken all of them.

GNU/Linux is used on an incredible 443 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world. It has become by far the most dominant system in this field. Of the top ten most reliable sites on the Internet in December 2009, six were running some version of Linux. (Two more were running FreeBSD, another free operating system; only one was running a Microsoft server.) Despite being powerful enough to run the world’s supercomputers and the world’s most reliable web servers, it’s still versatile enough to be a strong competitor in the smartphone market (Google’s Android, for example, is based on Linux), and it’s got a small but not negligible share of the desktop market, as well. (The author uses it exclusively himself.)

Whether Linux is better or worse than its competitors is beside the point here; what’s significant is that it is a competitor, and that much no one can deny. How did it get to be such? How did Linux become such a significant player in such a wide variety of operating system markets? Surely it must be by the most cutthroat of competition, doing whatever it can to outsmart and outplay the other players in the field?

No. It did so by cooperation.

It was recently announced by the kernel community (Linux is, technically, a kernel, or the central core of the operating system; in other words, the part of your operating system that interacts directly with the bare metal of your hardware) that a full 75% of developers of the Linux kernel are paid. This is a big deal for a kernel that started out almost twenty years ago with a guy in his dorm room coding an operating system for fun. Red Hat, a Linux corporation, unsurprisingly contributed the most code, some 12%. But Intel, the chip manufacturer, contributed 8%, IBM and Novell contributed 6% each, and Oracle contributed 3%. Some of these companies, like IBM, produce competing operating systems, or once did. Most of them are competitors of each other; for example, Oracle produces its own Linux distribution (Unbreakable Linux), as does Red Hat (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Novell (SUSE Linux).

This may bear some explanation. Linus Torvalds, the original coder of the Linux kernel, is still in charge of its development. He is paid by the Linux Foundation, a non-profit which is contributed to by many corporations, from IBM to Google. When people contribute to the kernel, it’s vetted by a huge number of coders and others, until it’s finally (if it’s good enough) approved by Torvalds and put into the kernel itself. Once it’s there, it’s available to everyone on the planet to use as they will. Really; once it’s in the kernel, anybody can use it for whatever they want, as long as they don’t prevent anyone else from doing the same. So when IBM contributes to the Linux kernel, its competitors can take the contribution and use it to compete with IBM. And yet they continue, year after year, to contribute a large part of the improvements to the Linux kernel. And their competitors continue to do the same, even though they’re fully aware that IBM can turn around and use that contribution to compete with them. Essentially, each of these companies, when they contribute to the kernel, is assisting its competitors. This, according to the competition-uber-alles argument, makes absolutely no sense.

These companies have every incentive to improve their product and leave the others in the lurch. So why are they contributing to the Linux kernel, which make all their improvements to that kernel available to all of their competitors?

The simple answer is that doing so makes the world better for everyone.

Companies contribute to the kernel because not only do other companies get the benefit of their work, but they get the benefit of other companies’ work. No one company could possibly have produced an operating system that scales from incredibly massive supercomputers to a cell phone that fits in my pants pocket. It couldn’t happen. It had to be done by an enormous number of developers, all cooperating on the same project; no one company alone could have paid them all. The Unix market was fragmenting and dying when Linux came along; the many different Unix vendors were killing one another by competing instead of cooperating. Linux changed all that; the Unix derivatives are now stronger than ever, and getting stronger by the day. Because companies are cooperating on it, rather than fighting about it.

Their incentive, in other words, doesn’t have to be beating out the competition; it can be making things better for themselves. Certainly, when a company contributes to Linux, it’s not being altruistic; it contributes because it knows that by improving the kernel, it’s making it more useful to others, who will improve it in turn, and that company will then get the benefit of that. And competition isn’t totally out of the picture, either; beating out Microsoft is almost certainly one of the motives that leads these companies to cooperate on the Linux kernel. But it’s not being solely competitive; it’s being cooperative, and competitive within proper limits. It’s recognizing that by cooperating with others to make a better product, it’s able to compete in other areas.

No distributist dislikes competition. But no distributist likes corporate throat-cutting, either. Sometimes competition just isn’t in the best interests of an industry; sometimes the improvement of the industry can only come from cooperation, rather than competition. The sooner many industries realize this, the better off we all will be.

Praise be to Christ the King!

The Mixed Blessing: Caritas in Veritate, Part V

Caritas in Veritate is an excellent document which provides valuable follow-through on several vital parts of traditional Catholic social teaching. From the importance of workingmen’s associations to the importance of spiritual considerations in economic thought, Caritas continues the ever-clearer proclamation that the Church is neither capitalist nor socialist, but Catholic, an entirely different thing.

The document further successfully applies traditional Catholic social principles to new problems, including environmental issues, tourism, and the psychiatric industry. In so doing, Pope Benedict has provided essential guidance to his flock on how to think about and handle these issues, guidance which will prove invaluable in coming years.

On the other hand, the encyclical leaves something to be desired. Pope Benedict’s endorsement of internationalism, apparently failing to acknowledge any of the practical or theoretical difficulties of this position, has rightly given many Catholic some distress. Most importantly, despite repeatedly stating the necessity of Christianity in society, Pope Benedict in the end downplayed that necessity. His Holiness states not only that “[o]ther cultures and religions teach brotherhood and peace and are therefore of enormous importance to integral human development,”¹ he even goes so far as to say that development requires other religions.² His Holiness does, of course, unequivocally state that this “does not mean religious indifferentism, nor does it imply that all religions are equal,”³ but if that is the case it is hard to see why true human development would require any religion but the true one. And nowhere in the entire encyclical does His Holiness mention that primary and indispensable driver of all true social reform: Christ the King, by right the ruler of all men, families, associations, and states. This neglect is the aspect of the document most disturbing to the Catholic distributist. It leaves a hole in the document that is quite clear even after repeated rereading.

All the same, distributists, particularly Catholic distributists, should embrace the encyclical. Since 1993, relying on a clear misreading of Centesimus Annus, capitalists have been claiming that the Church has abandoned her previous, anti-capitalist (as well as anti-socialist) social teachings, embracing the so-called free-market capitalism that characterizes the Western democracies. Now, at last, distributism has vindication, in terms so plain and clear that no one can deny their import: Catholic social teaching is not capitalist, and is indeed contrary to capitalism. Distributism has also been provided with several valuable examples of applying traditional Catholic social principles to new problems; Pope Benedict’s handling of the environmental issue in particular provides an admirable model for Catholic social thinkers.

The jewelry box of resources from which distributist can draw has been permanently and valuably expanded. We all owe our admiration and gratitude to the current occupant of the See of St. Peter for bravely upholding the principles of Catholic social teaching in a world ever-increasingly hostile to them. Let us pray that God continue to strengthen and enlighten Pope Benedict, that he may continue to strengthen and confirm us, his flock.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Footnotes

1. Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 55.
2. Id. (stating that “development needs the religions and cultures of different peoples,” certainly a true statement of the latter but equally certainly not of the former).
3. Id.

The Mainstream Media is Terrible

Really, the title just about says it all.

It’s truly awful. They spent more time covering the Obama family’s new dog than they did relevant events in this nation. “In breaking news today, Barack Obama had a cheeseburger and onion rings for lunch….[proceed with twenty minute exposition of Obama's food and exercise habits]…In other news, two Marines were killed in Baghdad today.”

Honestly. How much worse can this get? The United States is occupying two countries thousands of miles away, the economy continues to tank, millions are out of work, babies continue to be ripped apart with the full protection of the law on a daily basis, fifty percent of marriages wind up in divorce, an increasingly enormous percentage of children are born out of wedlock, our educational system has collapsed to the point of complete worthlessness, et cetera ad nauseum, and the best the media can come up with is to talk about what a great entertainer Michael Jackson was?

The mainstream media is not only terrible; it’s a joke, a complete waste of time, money, and energy. We ought to have no part of it.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Books: Modernity’s Abuse of an Art

Note: This is an old post from the now pretty much defunct New Distributist League website, whose role has been taken over by the more active Distributist Review. I think its considerations are still relevant, so I’m reposting it here.

Having read lately the words of the great Hilaire Belloc on modernity’s ignorance of books and their importance (I’d encourage readers who aren’t familiar with the work to read through it themselves, at Belloc Speaks: On the Decline of the Book), I thought I’d extend that to the decline of the mechanical art of the book—that is, to the simple make-up of a good, sturdy book. Like most crafts, that of bookbinding has suffered a vast decline in the modern age; but once, the make-up of a book was a piece of great artistry and talent.

Most modern readers will blink a little bit at this and, after remarking that they like a well-put-together book as much as anyone, will be perfectly satisfied with their paperbacks or hardcovers and never think another thing about it. But the fact is that modernity, thanks to the sort of thinking that gives rise to both capitalism and socialism, has destroyed a once great art, an art that deserves learning and maintaining for our descendants. That is the subject of this article.

I begin by saying that this article owes absolutely nothing to my own skill in this ancient art, which is slight and halting. For the knowledge contained herein, I am indebted first and foremost to the master binders at Colonial Williamsburg, who spent four good years answering my constant inquiries despite the fact that they didn’t even know my name. Much of the technical knowledge, which could not be gained without an apprenticeship, I have acquired through reading, most especially Douglas Cockerell’s Bookbinding and the Care of Books and Edith Diehl’s Bookbinding: Its Background and Technique. Those interested in this most important craft are encouraged to seek further information there.

Books were once precious; purchasing one might take a month of an average man’s wages, and the vast majority of the populace owned none or only one or two (generally the Bible or a Primer). The rich owned many, and the Church, of course, had many; but each of these was a work of art in itself, even speaking purely mechanically, independently of its content. Books carried knowledge, and knowledge is power; they imparted wisdom and understanding to those who understood them, and were formed and cared for appropriately considering this great, almost mystical, property which is uniquely theirs.

The book was a long time in developing, and always got better and more sensible until the arrival of modern economical philosophies rendered art a financial liability and artlessness an inducement to profit. A brief history of this development, drawn more or less entirely from Diehl’s excellent work mentioned above, will be helpful in determining what I mean.

The first set of records put together for a specific purpose was the “foundation cylinder.” Symbols were inscribed upon the outside of the cylinder, and the reader turned it as he read; when he had turned it all the way around, he had read the entire “book.” This is, clearly, a cumbersome way of recording things, and is suitable only for short passages. A better form had to be devised.

It was followed by the clay tablet, a simpler though larger form of record, which was first used by the ancient Babylonians. Often the writing would continue from tablet to tablet, and they would be covered and organized by subject matter on shelves, just as books are. The first library in recorded history was of clay tablets, at Nineveh. It was destroyed along with that city at the fall of the Assyrian empire.

The classical scroll was first used in Egypt; papyrus sheets were pasted together, and the writer simply continued pasting until he was finished. The roll was then tightened and placed in a cylindrical container. This held writings very compactly, but was cumbersome to read, requiring the unrolling of the scroll in such a way as to prevent its complete unravelling but still permitting reading. The material of papyrus was used for millenia, but greatly limited the form of records. It was too brittle to be folded without breaking, which meant that it could never be used for a book. So the scroll was the only acceptable form until a better writing medium was devised.

That medium came with the invention of vellum. The skins of animals had been used for writing before, but they had always been prepared by tanning, like other leather. Vellum, however, is prepared not by tanning, but by another process too complicated to enter into here, though Diehl treats it in some detail. For a time vellum was used in scrolls just as papyrus was; however, the material permitted a superior form of record to develop.

Scrolls were generally inscribed (that is, written upon) in one of two ways. First, the lines would sometimes be continued all along the length of the scroll, then returned to the beginning. This was somewhat cumbersome for later reading, so the second form developed: continue the lines along the length of the scroll for some sensible distance, then return to just below where the first line began and start again. Continue doing this until one reached the bottom of the scroll, then start a new column. Essentially, this made a scroll a long line of pages lined up one after another. The new medium of vellum allowed these pseudo-pages to become pages in fact.

Somewhere in the Middle East, someone got the idea of folding the scroll, to make it into a pile of these “pages” that could be unfolded as one read. Two boards (unattached to the folded “scroll”) were placed on top and underneath to keep the folds flat. This, of course, lent itself to another development: why not cut the folds off on one side, and keep the other side bound together, allowing one to just flip through the pages rather than having to unfold one side and fold up the other as one read? When the backs of these books were bound, and the boards on top and bottom were attached (now to protect the pages, rather than merely to keep them flattened), the early Christian codex was born. This was, for all intents and purposes, our book.

Such is the power of this seemingly simple form that no less a rationalist and scientific utopian than Isaac Asimov, in “The Ancient and the Ultimate,” described the perfect form for preserving our thoughts and ideas for the future and for other men: nothing other than our ancient, perfect book. Yet despite its apparent simplicity, man took four thousand years to develop it, eighteen hundred years perfecting it—and only one hundred and fifty destroying it. But I’m afraid I’m moving ahead of myself; the book has still only just been made.

Throughout the Christian era, the book’s form was strengthened and made more permanent, more eduring, to befit most of the material which was being bound, the classics of pagan and Christian philosophy and, of course, of the Christian religion, especially the Scriptures and books of the Sacraments. Gradually, the boards came to be attached to the manuscript itself; cords were sewn to the signatures, or leaves, of the book, and they were then laced into the boards (generally oaken, at least in northern Europe), ensuring the permanency of the binding. These boards would then be covered by leather of many types, from pigskin to lamb. The medieval craftsmen withheld no effort or expense in their quest to make permanent, beautiful volumes; the cords used for binding were not single, but double, and made of leather; even the head and tail guards were sewn throughout and laced into the boards. This was the age when binding, as such, truly came into being; these books would last for centuries, and when they finally did wear out, after five or six hundred years, they could be unbound, the paper still intact, and rebound with new boards and covers.

The medieval diligence was relaxed somewhat with the invention of printing; the volume of books was simply too great to permit such extravagance with every project. However, permanency and beauty was never sacrificed; the cords were no longer doubled, perhaps, and the boards were no longer wooden; the head and tail guards were not sewn throughout, nor were they laced in. But the quality of these books was still superb; and the stronger, older bindings could still be executed for books of particularly lasting value, like the Scriptures or the breviary.

A summary of the condition of the book at this point (call it the late eighteenth century) would be helpful. Books of any lasting value (that is, everything but propaganda tracts, almanacs, and the like) were printed mostly on paper, not vellum; however, this was rag paper, not wood pulp paper, and would last literally for centuries without deterioration of any significant kind. I personally have handled four-hundred-year-old rag paper and found it still supple, not at all brittle, and though it had been handled repeatedly and even occasionally roughly it was in perfectly legible and sturdy order.

Many “pages” of the book were printed on a single sheet of this rag paper; the bookbinder took these large sheets (often called “broadsides,” on which newspapers are still printed) and folded them appropriately so that the pages would all appear in the proper sequence. These folded sheets are known as “signatures.” The binder then pressed the signatures for several days to ensure that they would lay perfectly flat; this done, he put the back of the book (what we now would call, improperly for modern books, the “binding”) against cords, made of acid-free linen (medieval binders used leather, stronger but stiffer), generally five in number, and sewed each and every signature, by hand, to each and every cord, adding a “kettle-stitch” about halfway between the final cord and the end on both the top and bottom of the back. He used linen thread for this, as well; cotton deteriorates too quickly, and tends to be weak under pressure. He later laced the cords firmly into the front and back boards (what we’d call, properly for modern bindings, the “covers”), to ensure their firm attachment.

The signatures sewn, he began a complicated process known as “backing,” in which the back (“binding”) of the book was treated so that it would open freely and easily (indeed, such books could be opened and folded back on themselves without any harm to the back itself, though with today’s books such activity is disastrous). This involved many steps, not least of which involved covering the whole of the back in a fine layer of hide glue (too much would make the back brittle; too little, weak). It was important to ensure that the curvature of the back was precisely correct, or the book would be too “tight” (that is, it would not rest open, but constantly try to close itself by the force of its back). Furthermore, the few signatures at the beginning and the end of the book had to be knocked down, so that, when the boards were added, they would form a tight joint, without knocking them down so much that they would overlap, and possibly lose parts of their texts into the binding. This was rightly considered the most delicate part of the process, short of decorating the actual covers.

After the book was backed, the binder would put on the head and tail pieces (small lines of linen on the top and bottom of the back; these prevented the pages from getting caught or worn when the book was removed from or replaced on the shelf, and were often quite an art form in themselves).

Then the boards would be added. These were not simply pasted to the end papers (the blank sheets on the top and bottom of the book), as they are in modern books, but were firmly attached and seen as an integral part of the volume. When the book was backed, the binder had knocked down the two edges of the curve to provide a spot for the joint between the back and the boards. Now, the boards were fitted into that joint. The location of the cords were marked on the boards; the boards were removed, and the binder then punched holes in them at the proper locations. He then replaced the boards in the joints, one at a time, and laced the cords (already sewn, remember, individually to each and every signature) through the boards. Care was taken that the boards were not attached too firmly, lest the book not open far enough or easily enough; properly, the book should, when opened and set on a table, rest opened without any tendency to close itself, and without any damage being done to the binding (note that in modern books this behavior can only be achieved by “cracking” the binding, which completely ruins what little strength it has). This completed, the book was ready for the final step: the covering.

The binder had several choices for covering, conventionally known as the quarter-cover, the half-cover, and the full-cover. The quarter cover consisted of leather wrapped around the back of the book and over part of the sides; it was rarely used. The half-cover, much more common, consisted of a quarter cover embellished by leather also wrapped around the two fore corners; it was common for utilitarian volumes like bankbooks. Finally, the full cover, utilized for any book of lasting and significant value, consisted of leather wrapped around the entirety of the book. This cover would often be decorated, as explained below.

We’ll presume a full-cover here. The leather was first treated; not chemically, but with a special blade called a “paring knife.” The leather was pared, or thinned to the appropriate thickness. This had to be done with great care, lest the leather be thinned to the point that it was no longer strong enough to protect the volume. Various parts of the leather were kept thicker, and various thinner, depending on where strength and flexibility was most needed. The precise spots would vary based on the book itself and how its construction had proceeded. Especially important to pare were the edges; these had to be wrapped around the edges of the boards, and if too thick would prevent the book from closing flush to the pages, but if too thin would be prone to tearing from the edges of the boards.

Different types of leather would be selected. In medieval times, especially in northern Europe, pigskin was common; this was strong, of course, but also comparatively inflexible. By the heyday of the binder’s craft, the early to mid eighteenth century, two types of leather were recognized as the best: skiver, or lambskin, which was strong but so thin that it scarcely required any paring, and Moroccan goatskin, which was highly valued for its skiver-like characteristics combined with its delightful reddish color.

The binder then applied a layer of wheat paste to the entirety of the inside of the leather; he then stretched the leather in one piece around the whole of the book. This had to be done quickly; the moisture of the wheat paste expanded the leather, and it would shrink as it dried, so it was important that it be in its proper place before the shrinkage began. Especially difficult were wrapping around the corners and at the binding, as the leather had to be folded properly behind itself at the binding, where there was no board for it to be wrapped around. Some edges, once the cover was on and dried, would be snipped; then the end papers were pasted on, over the edges of the leather. Remember that this was rag paper, and the paste did not have the ruinous effect that it has on cheap modern pulp.

It is important to note that for the master binder of binding’s golden age, the cover served two purposes: strength and beauty. It did not hold the book together; it made the book stronger, more resistent to the elements, easier to use, and more beautiful. But the binding, the part that really held the book together in one piece, had already been done before the leather was even pared. That is, it was the binding part of the book: the backs of the signature sewn to the cords and properly backed. The cover added to its strength, but it did not form it. The book was firm and strong before the leather was ever added.

The leather would then be decorated, if desired. This decoration could be as elaborate or as simple as the nature of the book and the desire and talent of the binder were able to justify. The cover was decorated either with blind tooling (simple designs imprinted on the leather) or gold leaf (blind tooling into which real gold leaf was placed). Many binders created works not only of solid material craftsmanship, but also of stunning artistic beauty in this way.

Of course, shorter-lived books were bound differently; once pressed and flattened, the binder simply punched three holes from top to bottom on the back, then laced it together through them with some sturdy linen cords. This would do for works of only transient significance, such as almanacs, short stories, and political tracts (and was indeed considerably sturdier than most of even the strongest modern bindings). But lasting works were done as just described.

This, then, is the condition of the book after fifteen hundred years of development, the art being passed down and improved from master to apprentice for a millenium and a half. The book is a craft and an art; its focus is on quality, strength, and beauty first, and the profitability of the trade only second. Then, however, enter modernity and capitalism; the whole art begins to break down.

The nineteenth century began the doom of this great art. The first blow was the development of wood pulp paper; this supplanted almost entirely (and continues to supplant) the use of the studier and nearly immortal rag paper which had previously been used. This paper begins to deteriorate after a mere decade or so; if treated very well, it may last for a century or more, but only if treated very well. But the old rag paper lasted centuries even when treated badly and used heavily. This was unquestionably a step down, and began the change for bookbinding from long-lasting art to merely profitable business.

Bindings began to be reduced in quality. With signatures sewn strongly and beautifully on cords, the cords show through on the back, providing a beautiful and functional reminder of the book’s solid craftsmanship and strength. For whatever reason, however, it became stylish to have smooth backs, and so binders, succombing to the all-important profit motive, often sacrificed the integrity of their craft on the altar of increased gain. They sawed into the backs of the signatures and embedded the cords within; this significantly reduced the strength of the back and the longevity of the paper, which with the introduction of wood paper had already been immensely reduced. Eventually, they began to sew the signatures on mere flimsy tapes, rather than the sturdy linen, or even leather, cords; this gave rise to the phenomenon of books only five or ten years old literally falling apart at their seams, the bindings sadly lasting even less time than the low-quality paper they attempt to hold together.

Soon, even true binding was abandoned; rather than binding the entire set of signatures together, a mere fraction of the signatures were sewn on three, rather than the usual and sensible five, cords. Soon, those cords were even eliminated, being replaced with flimsy plastic tapes. Most of the job of “binding” (that is, holding the signatures together) was now done by a layer of paste wiped over the back, a sad substitute for the strong bindings of the prior age. Those flimsy tapes were no longer laced into the boards, either, thus truly binding together the signatures, the boards, and the cover, but rather the boards were attached to the signatures only by the endpapers, pasted to the inside of the boards (once only one of the many ways in which the book was held together), and the cover (rarely if ever leather) merely wrapped around that, completely separate from the binding. This would rightly have shocked the traditional binder; the book is no longer really bound, but merely cased, with boards on either side, going almost all the way back to the old codex. The art, and even the trade, of really binding had died; now mere casing, almost universally mechanical, controls.

And all this decay, remember, is entirely hardcover; we have not even begun to mention the inferiority of paperback “bindings.”

Why did this happen? For the same reason that all the great traditional crafts have been broken: the love of money. Binders (and, more often, their employers) could sell more books for less, and thus make greater profit, the lower the quality of their bindings. The average person, unschooled in the ancient art, won’t know the difference, thinks a book is a book, and will simply buy without worrying about it. This is the death of crafts and the severe wounding of art, and a capitalist will never worry about it. Why should he? It must be good; it’s increased the profit margins.

That’s the reason that, for example, great architecture is practically never produced, why the capitalist age has never produced anything even remotely comparable to the Gothic cathedrals or the great palaces of the old world: there’s no money in it. People need places to stay and do things; they’ll stay and do things in a mediocre building just as readily as in a beautiful one, and it’s much cheaper to build that way. They’ll fancy a building up, of course; people like perks. But beauty isn’t always profitable, so capitalism doesn’t need it. Herein lies one of the greatest evils of capitalism (and with it, socialism, though for an entirely different reason): it kills art in the name of merely material gain.

This situation in books is parallel to that of many once-great arts, and many arts which could become great if not stifled by the all-powerful necessity of seeking the greatest possible profit with the least possible expenditure. What can the distributist do, practically, to help slow, or even reverse, this process? What we can do for books will provide some principles for what we can do with everything, even though naturally the details will change according to the subject.

For books, the first step is the most important: print fewer books. There is no need for the vast quantity of print that is churned out of publishing houses year after year. Certainly, there is no need to go back to copying vital manuscripts by hand; a large volume of books is a valuable and important thing. But a large volume of books is useful only if it is a large volume of good books. Can we honestly claim that the books which moderns are constantly cranking from the presses are vital to human flourishing? Some of them are, certainly; but the vast majority are frivolous, unnecessary, and often positively harmful publications that ought never to have been printed. They are published not because they will edify their readers, enlighten the populace, or serve to build virtue in society; they are published because they will sell well. To foster the mechanical art of books we must eliminate such frivolous publication. The fewer the books and the more important their content, the more likely that men will see their value and prepare them mechanically in a manner worthy of their subjects. Further, the fewer the books, the fewer men will buy; this will not only focus their attention more on the contents of those books, having less frivolous nonsense to read, but will make men more willing to spend the necessary funds on quality binding for those books, since they are buying many fewer. Granted, this point is beyond the purview of the binder and within that of the printer, but it’s a necessary step in the process.

The second step is equally simple: guage the quality of binding based on the importance of the book. For example, when binding a copy of Holy Writ, the best of bindings is not good enough; we must always execute the most permanent possible binding for such volumes. Books of the Sacraments must be likewise treated with the utmost respect. This is difficult to understand, sometimes, in these postconciliar days, when new “translations” and “editions” and outright revisions of the sacred rites seem to be published every week or two, but when the world returns to some measure of sanity it will thank us for our care and foresight. Sacred books deserve only the best; we would not offer the Holy Mass with a mere wineglass, and neither should we hold our Scriptures in a low-quality paper case. Some books are more important than others, and ought to be treated as such. This will allow the binder to handle a large volume of books, and even make a profit from them, while still preserving the full glory of his craft where it is truly needed.

Most importantly, of course, and also the sine qua non, is what distributists have been saying since the notion of distributism was invented: institute and live out the Social Reign of Christ the King. Remember Christ, and remember that greed should not be the driving force of the economy. Encourage and enable craftsmen to free themselves from their employers and become their own masters, which will also free themselves from the demands of corporate profitability. Then, remind craftsmen that there are more important things than turning an ever-increasing profit far beyond what anyone needs to maintain themselves and their families. Hearken them back to the guilds of past ages, who carefully set their prices to ensure both affordability of their products, sustainability of their craftsmen, and, most relevant here, the integrity of their craft. Modernity doesn’t care about craftsmanship unless it makes them money, and in this case it just doesn’t make enough for the ever-increasing appetite of modern man. But a craftsman loves and values his craft; if he can make a living, he will settle for his living, and refuse to sacrifice his craft for the sake of getting more.

Our society does not encourage craftsmen; it encourages businessmen. Thus, it does not encourage production of works of craftsmanship, but rather of money. Let us try to change our society; let us focus once again on using our God-given talents not to produce greater quantities of digitized green paper, but on producing works of value, of beauty, and of grace. Only by submitting ourselves and our society to the rule of Christ the King can we overcome our greed and selfishness and focus instead on doing good. Let us work for and welcome that reign; only in this way can we regain this and all the other lost crafts and glories that we once raised up to our Savior.

I conclude with the prayer to our Almighty Father, that through the intercession of the glorious and immaculate Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, the ancient art of bookbinding might return to its former glory, and the holy and elevated things will again be esteemed and treated as the precious things that they are. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

Praise be to Christ the King!

Shocking Bailout Revelation

A little while ago, I posted a very brief critique of the bailouts. Fun as tossing enormous quantities of money into a gigantic hole can be, I argued, we just don’t have any more money to do that with. No, worries, said President Obama; we’ll just print some more.

Now, however, an absolutely shocking and totally unexpected news story has revealed that the bailout may not have been motivated entirely by our benevolent Congress’s vigilant concern for the common good. Yes, I’m being sarcastic.

It is, or should be, absolutely no surprise to anyone that both parties are largely in the pocket of big business interests, particularly ones that involve banks. But to continue to maintain that the bailouts we passed were or are a good idea, motivated by a concern for the economic well-being of our country, should now be off the table. Some Congressmen probably really did believe that they were helping the country, I suppose; however, it’s clear to me that for the most part the bailouts were former big businessmen and investors in big business in the government helping out their colleagues and money holders in the private sector.

Traditional Thomistic philosophy has identified, roughly, three types of government: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Monarchy is rule for the sake of the common good by one; aristocracy is rule for the sake of the common good by a few; and the polity is rule for the sake of the common good by many. Each of these, however, can be corrupted when rule is not for the sake of the common good, but for some particular good; for example, for the sake of big business or personal interests. Monarchy, when it is corrupted, is called tyranny; aristocracy, when it is corrupted, is called oligarchy; and the polity, when it is corrupted, is called democracy.

Which are we?

Praise be to Christ the King!

UPDATE: Shockingly again, many of the projects funded by our “economic stimulus” package are stupid and useless make-work! I’m shocked to find out that gambling is going on here! Shocked, I tell you!

Technology and Distributism

Some comments at The Distributist Review have brought an issue to my attention. Commenter “CP” pointed out that distributists seem to focus too much on agriculture and heavy industry and not enough on other fields. At first, I disagreed; agriculture and industry are the bedrocks of an economic system, and it seems hard to believe that we could focus on that too much. However, on reflection, I think he’s correct about this. Oftentimes we, as distributists, do neglect the role that improving technology and science can play in furthering the distributist system, particularly in fields apart from agriculture and industry. However, technology can play an important part in distributing certain trades, and the distributist who neglects this is neglecting an important aspect of distributist thought. Belloc, after all, noted in The Servile State that the industrial revolution, had it occurred in a distributive rather than a capitalist state, would have been just as beneficial to the worker as it ended up harmful to him. Far be it from a mere follower of Belloc like myself to disagree with him on that.

Distributists are often accused of being inimical to technology. This, of course, is not so; distributists are merely cautious about it, rather than accepting every new gadget and invention that pops out of the corruptible mind of man. Sometimes, this means that distributists frequently reject the use of certain technologies; for example, most distributists argue that modern chemical farming techniques are a net loss to society. However, sometimes this means that distributists embrace technology. The difference is that some technologies contribute to the common good, while some derogate from it.

The computer, for example, makes distributist economies much easier in many industries. The most obvious example is publishing. Publishing was originally done by small printing presses, which were available to the common craftsman; a master printer would print out, say, a newspaper, or a book, and sell it in his local area. Because production in this way was limited in quantity, printing had to distributed out to many different printers, who did most of the printing for their local areas. In this way, the great classics of the pre-printing age were spread and made common, such that even the poorest could have a Bible, or a Primer, or both, with some saving.

In the nineteenth century, however, publishing became industrialized, and the ownership of copyrights (the right to publish) became concentrated in an increasingly small group of corporations. Without paying these corporations, you couldn’t have the book; without paying them exorbitant licensing fees, you certainly couldn’t print it and distribute it. Furthermore, the industry was very difficult to break into for a small publisher, barring some type of niche market, because the equipment required was huge and incredibly expensive. The enormous printing machines owned and operated by these publishers were prohibitively expensive, and produced books so quickly and so cheaply that smaller printers couldn’t possibly compete in the same fields. Thus, distributism was completely defeated in the publishing industry; ordinary citizens could not be the owners of this type of productive property.*

However, the advent of the computer, and free professional-quality typesetting software like TeX, has changed all that. This technology allows anyone with an interest in publishing to become involved in the field. Professional-quality typesetting does involve a learning curve; professional-quality book design involves an even higher one. Any type of craft, no matter how mechanized, requires some specialized knowledge; this should come as no surprise, least of all to a distributist. However, someone with that knowledge can now enter the publishing field, and be successful, thanks to this new technology.

Technology, of course, is not alone in this fact. New discoveries and scientific research are also an enormous assistance in many fields. Thanks to new discoveries about plant and soil health, for example, small-scale organic farming is capable of producing yields as good or better than those of the famous “Green Revolution” chemical farming, while much more sustainably maintaining soil and water health; indeed, organic farming which takes into account these new discoveries actually does better than chemical farming in drought conditions. (See, e.g., Organic farming success.) Because small-scale chemical farming is prohibitively expensive, while small-scale organic farming is less so, the discoveries which led to these results are a real boon to distributists everywhere. Thus, the distributist who neglects such discoveries, or who does not wish man to continue to find new ones, is putting distributism itself at considerable risk.

Distributists should not neglect these aspects of the economy. The fields, the forests, the factories, and the mines are certainly the bedrock of the economy; however, they are not the entirety of the economy, nor are they limited to their status two centuries ago. Distributists should not be afraid of opening up discussion concerning these other fields, and in what ways new technologies and discoveries can improve the state of the economy in the present day.

Praise be to Christ the King!

* The nature and enforcement of copyright has also changed considerably, which naturally plays a role in who can print what. Here, I refer primarily to non-copyrighted work, such as the Bible, though I think the analysis applies partly to copyrighted works, as well.